Book Talk

During our excruciating repose on the rack of a cruelly protracted
presidential campaign, we have been constantly invited to think
about an ideal America, with the candidates, as usual, emphasizing
the rosy: universal health care, tax cuts made permanent, not even
one child left behind, victory in Iraq.

Readers of CUNY Matters over the years know I am big on Walt
Whitman, and now, I think, is the perfect moment to offer a rare
glimpse into his private, candid and unversified thoughts on an
ideal America. It was written 25 years after Whitman's death in
1892 by his devoted young friend Horace Traubel, who recorded nine
volumes' worth of Walt's conversations during his last four years.

This memoir was evoked by the "daily questions" Traubel was asked
during World War I about Whitman's "problematical attitude" toward
the war (he hated all war). There is, as you might expect, heavy
emphasis here on the "crowd," by which Traubel and Whitman meant
the public, the common citizen. Whitman's sarcasm about "college
decoration" is a swipe at the fancy Ivy League; Walt would have
vigorously approved of CUNY's mission to New York City's student
crowd.

This article, here slightly abridged, Traubel published in his own
monthly magazine, The Conservator, in November 1917; it is included
in my 2006 edition, Conserving Walt Whitman's Fame: Selections from
Horace Traubel's 'Conservator' 1890-1919, part of the University of
Iowa Press Whitman Series.

Would Whitman approve of a snapshot of the United States anno
domini 2008? "Noble fruition" or "incommensurable disaster"? You
decide. - Gary Schmidgall

Walt Whitman's America

Walt Whitman

Walt was never as strong in talking about war as he was in talking
about America. He had very high ideas of America. Not of the
America that we were but of the America we might be. The America of
idealisms and dreams. The America of noble manners and magnificent
soul. The welcomer of the oppressed. The asylum of the poor and
downtrodden. He loved to dilate upon that America. He was often
misunderstood. He was taken by literalists to be a partisan of
geographical America. To be a bragger and boaster. To blow about
our status. To swell his chest out and lift his head in the air and
tell big stories about ourselves. [Thomas] Carlyle and others
thought of Walt as a man who thought he was a big man because he
lived in a big country.

Well: let's take a face-to-face look at Walt's America. I discussed
the thing with him often. I never heard a phrase of bluster or
vainglory from his lips.

"Horace," he said to me: "why do you suppose the people who don't
want anything to do with me are so inclined to misrepresent my
point of view? It's as if they didn't want me to be what they must
know I am." What was he? I asked him that.

"Oh!" he went on: "I mean my special interpretation of America, the
republic, our experiment in democracy. Certainly I've never written
or spoken of it as an achieved thing: never! never!...

"My America is still all in the making: it's a promise, a possible
something: it's to come: it's by no means here. Besides, what do I
care about the material America? America is to me an idea, a
forecast, a prophecy: it may evolve to noble fruition or end as an
incommensurable disaster. I don't want to be tied to the little
conclusions of a petty nationalism. America will extend itself as
an idea, never I hope in conquest. I'd rather anything should
happen to us than that we should add one inch of territory to our
domain by conquest."

... When Walt spoke of America it was more abstractly than
concretely. America was a dear faith to him. A fact, still. But a
fact such as a well-fortified aspiration may be. I have even seen
him angry, or at least annoyed, by the display of cheap
American-ism. It was never his notion that we should lord it over
the world. He was concerned to have us set an example. Not,
however, in pride but in humility. He thought we'd had a better
chance. Therefore we should pay our bill. Paying our bill was
helping Europe to become what Europe had made it possible for us to
become.

You couldn't interest Walt in the wealth of America. He'd always go
back to his original question: But what kind of men are we raising
here?

He wanted America to give the crowd the best chance it ever had. To
give it the only chance it ever had. You can only grasp his highly
spiritualized conception of America by remembering that. And then
remember more. Remember that at bottom America was that chance. If
some other country having another name gave the crowd that chance
first he'd call that country America. And if our geographical
America, forgetting its high purpose, should deny the crowd that
chance, Walt would cease to think of it as America. The steadfast
picture in his attitude towards America was that of a modernized
everyday promised land.... It was not to repeat the old class
divisions but inaugurate an era of essential democracy.

Walt would see a picture of somebody, he might be of any race and
color, and he'd exclaim: "How American he looks!" Or he'd see a
picture of something and exclaim: "How American that looks!"

What did he have in mind? The natural thing. Simplicity. No medals.
No office. No college decoration. The man who worries about a
crease in his trousers has a crease in his mind. Walt was always
for getting down or up to people stripped of all extraneous
paraphernalia. Such people were always America to him. Do you begin
to see what his word "American" signified?

Walt spoke of loving the "powerful uneducated" person. He wanted
America to be the powerful uneducated country. He didn't object to
education because it was education but because it wasn't.

If the sun wasn't light he'd object to the sun too. If men weren't
brothers he'd object to men too. If America wasn't a democracy he'd
object to America too.... [H]e wanted America to be as big as its
size. He wanted it to be as big as its promise. As its words. As
its spirit.

And he'd shake his head over our financial exploits [i.e.
capitalism]. "No, no, no: a thousand times no: that's all been done
over and over again to the detriment of the race: all of it: what
we need is the prosperity of the common man: I can't think of
America as repeating the mistakes of Europe, of Asia, of the
past.... "

I heard a Whitmanite once defend pan-Americanism [i.e. American
imperialism] by quoting a passage from Leaves of Grass in which
Walt saw America in his mind's eye extending itself to "the
archipelagos of the Pacific." This disputant asked triumphantly:
"Who can say now that Whitman was opposed to conquest?" I said:
"Whitman wasn't predicting conquest but conviction." When I told
Walt the story he nodded to me and said: "Yes: it's obvious enough
to anybody who knows the language I talk. ... I'd like to see
America, my America, go round the globe, gloriously, not with
armies but in sacrificing humanisms: I've no enthusiasm about any
other America."...

You see he was always looking towards the transfigured America. The
America of his imagination was built upon the masses. Upon the
development of the crowd. Upon the general welfare and vista. Not
upon the fortunes or the culture of selected persons. Not upon an
exception but a rule. Not being made contingent upon what a
minority may do but upon what the immense total may learn and
assert. Not upon the professional classes but upon the crowd. ...
The ignorant informed crowd. The crowd. The major force of his
America. The fountainhead of its emancipated life. ...

Walt wanted an America from the people up and from the people down.
He wanted the crowd superstructure as well as the crowd foundation.
He thought America would give the world such an America. He had
some fears that it wouldn't, but he had more confidence that it
would. But one thing was above all sure. If our America didn't give
the world such an America, some other America would. And his
American idea, perhaps by some other name, sometime, somehow, would
lead our much harassed world of mistaken animosities out of its
shadowy tangle into fraternal acknowledgments and recognitions.

Inside Community Colleges

America as we know it would not exist without community colleges.
That is the contention of Gail O. Mellow and Cynthia Heelan in
Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of the American
Community College. The book provides an overview of the inclusive,
democratic and meritocratic impulses of community colleges and
their transparent boundaries between college, work and social life.
Mellow is the president of LaGuardia Community College; Heelan is
the former president of Colorado Mountain College.

Solar Sailing

The idea that sunlight exerts pressure has been around for more
than a century. In their book Solar Sails: A Novel Approach to
Interplanetary Travel, authors Gregory L. Matloff, Giovanni
Vulpetti and Les Johnson describe how solar sail propulsion can
make space exploration more affordable and provide access to
destinations beyond the solar system. They review current plans for
solar sails and how advanced technology, such as nanotechnology,
can enhance solar sail performance. Matloff is assistant professor
of physics and 2008 Scholar on Campus at CityTech.

Impossible Dreams

I n his latest book, professor Michio Kaku of City College and The
Graduate Center explores the science of the impossible, from death
rays to force fields and cloaks of invisibility. Will these
technologies become achievable the way TV, lasers and the atom
bomb, which seemed beyond the realm of possibility a century ago,
became reality? Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration
into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time
Travel offers an entertaining and informative journey into the
future.

Schlesinger Diaries

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died last year, knew many
of the leading public figures of the last half-century. The book
Journals 1952 – 2000 takes the reader through his diaries starting
with presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, for whom he was a
speechwriter. Schlesinger — who was Albert Schweitzer Professor of
the Humanities at CUNY's Graduate School and University Center from
1966 to 1994, when he became professor emeritus —offers firsthand
insights about President John F. Kennedy, whom he served as special
advisor, as well as the Vietnam War, Watergate, Ronald Reagan, the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the first Gulf War and the current
President Bush.